I’ve been in England for a little over a week, for The Smoke and Midwinter, and it’s the last place I’ll be standing still for at least the next two months. After this point I’ll be hopping around again every few days or so. I’m hoping it’s more relaxing than some of my past travel has been — since most of that time will be spent in Southeast Asia there’s a lot of resorts booked throughout there — but we’ll see how it actually plays out.

This also means I won’t have much of a chance to socialize until I’m back in April. I’m going to be traveling through Southeast Asia on my own.¹ I’ve spent extended amounts of time alone before earlier in 2019, but this’ll be twice as long. So I figure I should be fine. But maybe not. It’s hard to say until you try it.

At any rate, with an eye on all that I kind of made a point over the last month of scheduling travel a bit less hectically and a bit more socially — a week on a cruise, then a week in New York City, then a week in Lagos, then a week in London, all in the company of friends or family. I’m capping it off with about a week in Scandinavia, also with friends, and then I’m off on my own to Bangkok. And so in the past week I’ve done a bunch of larps and went out and talked and generally just tried to spend as much time as possible with as many people as possible.

I arrived in London just in time to attend The Smoke, an eclectic² larp convention. It’s the second year I’ve attended, and I played some solid games. There are two which stuck out to me. Ex Tempore was a mix of escape room and larp, which mostly worked, although I think the two different sides of the game kind of pulled against one another³ — so in practice you had parts which were escape room, and parts which were larp, and the overlap wasn’t as strong as I had hoped.⁴ I also quite liked Dangerous Liaisons, which was a sad, bittersweet larp about the death of the nobility during the French Revolution.

I also wanted to mention Katalin, a weird experience — the designer was careful not to label it a larp — which was built around an archive of cassette tapes he and his mother had found in his aunt’s apartment after his aunt’s death. He took three tapes which had been recorded and subsequently erased by his aunt and converted them into a soundscape. The participants were asked to simply to react to it, voicelessly, over the course of an hour. So the bulk of the experience was spent in a dark room listening to this ghostly tape and humming along with it or tapping out rhythms and counter-rhythms or slowing moving around in response. Which sounds super-weird⁵ but was relaxing and meditative and pretty much an excellent way to end the convention.

I’ve got enough issues with the social aspects of The Smoke that I’m unsure I’ll be attending next year.⁶ Which is too bad, because they’re still attracting some pretty great larps and larp designers.

I had a friend who was happened to be visiting London at the same time I was there, so we decided to make a week of it. So after The Smoke I got to be a tourist all over again. I had bought tickets to the interactive Wolf of Wall Street, which was disappointing⁷ and my friend discovered how cheap theater tickets were in London and got two to Uncle Vanya.⁸

I had almost forgotten how great the theater was in London. The first time I visited, as a student I bought cheap tickets to things almost every single night. I don’t do that so often anymore. And maybe there’s a cautionary tale there; I talk a lot about wanting to get beyond being a tourist and feeling what it’s like to actually live someplace. But you can lose sight of a city by getting too familiar with it, as well. It helps to bring a fresh pair of eyes.

But the big highlight of the trip was Midwinter. Midwinter is a larp set in Santa’s workshop. The players are all playing elves⁹ working hard to produce the toys for Christmas. Altogether too hard — the quotas keep ramping up, the Reindeer Guard circulate freely throughout the workshop enforcing minimum levels of jollity¹⁰ and ensuring everyone is working, and if all else fails there is the Krampus dragging off elves for “reeducation.”

All in all, it was a very good game. Logistically, everything ran about as smoothly as one could expect.¹¹ The game was played in a old factory converted over to an airsoft space, so it was bitterly cold with harsh concrete floors and what few bits of holiday cheer the elves managed to put up around the place.

I played Balthazar Frost, manager of half the workgroups, who was genuinely a good and hard-working elf who believed in the system and harbored few discontents, although he bitterly resented the Head Manager, who had her position strictly because she was a Claus. As so often happens in these games, Balthazar got everything he wanted in the worst possible way, when the Head Manager was demoted and beaten up by the Reindeer Guards for failing to make quotas immediately before the final workshop before Christmas, leaving Balthazar in charge of everything and doomed to fail.¹²

The setting, in other words, was jinglebleak. The more games I play, the more I’m finding games recapitulating other games in setting or tone or premise. And I get that, I do. You play a game that inspires you and think “but what if this were different?” or you decide to use a setting where you have easy access to props or where there’s already a demonstrative audience. But these games start to wear ruts in the road pretty quickly; choosing an underused setting means there’s a chance to forge completely new character types, or to break free of old habits which start to intrude.

And I guess that’s what I appreciated about the game the most. These aren’t exactly new themes: the dehumanization inherent to capitalism, the allure of gauzy illusion over harsh truth, the fear of standing up against oppression. But it was all done up in gift wrapping, making it feel new and interesting and worth exploring a bit more.

I’ve been thinking more and more about larps with dystopian settings, that play on themes of oppression. There are people living in police states today, who do get dragged off for reeducation. You certainly don’t want to trivialize that experience.¹³ But larps can provide a visceral understanding that can be difficult to experience through other means.

In a lot of ways, Midwinter managed to live in that sweet spot between being silly and fanciful enough to distance itself from the real world, while still retaining enough of the horror of repressive systems to be effective. I think that’s a valuable takeaway.

I suppose I don’t have much of a problem with art that exists for pure escapism. Lord knows we need some of that, given the current world. But I often find myself attracted to polemics. I don’t want to have to escape the world. I want the world to be worth living in, for all of us. And for that we need the hope, the tools, and the inspiration to change it.

Midwinter ended with the inevitable socialist uprising against the powers-that-be, with an almost bloodless revolution and the elves taking charge of the workshop. And maybe that seemed a little too easy, a little too far-fetched. But it was Christmas. It’s okay to have a fairytale. Let the good guys win, for once.

Next: Kiruna (KRN) to Oslo (OSL)
Prev: Lagos (LOS) to London (LGW)

Footnotes

¹ I’ve been trying to get in touch with a friend I’ve got through there, but haven’t managed to do so yet.

² It’s described as “chamber larp, blackbox and freeform” but it feels more like “whatever some designer could throw into a small undecorated room” and not in a bad way.

³ The room was dark with a limited number of flashlights, and there were creatures wandering around who would menace you if you made noise so you needed to gesture or work silently. These are maybe great elements for a puzzle room, but less so for a larp.

⁴ I’m not sure you really can layer those two things particularly well; trying to collaborate and solve puzzles isn’t really well-suited to larp characters who are prone to breaking down and rambling about their fears and desires. It’s pretty easy to play to lose an escape room.

⁵ I mean, it was super-weird.

⁶ Most of the socializing happens in fairly small concrete rooms packed to the gills with people. Too noisy, too crowded, too much movement at the corners of my eyes to focus. They’re hampered by the venue they have, so I don’t see any great ways of fixing it, but it’s still exhausting.

⁷ Sleep No More was great because you could wander around and get lost in the space, even absent any performances going on. Then She Fell was great because it took you on a private tour though a intimate story.

The Wolf of Wall Street was the worst of both worlds. You didn’t get to choose where to wander and the space wasn’t compelling enough to spend much time in anyway. And you still ended up mobbed in a huge crowd.

I think the show was designed because someone thought it would be amazing to recreate those crazy 1980s parties, but after they started doing some research they realized Jordan Belfort is kind of an asshole — the movie avoided the sexual assault accusations. So the show ended up being this weird surreal coked-up party lifestyle story interspersed with with an FBI investigation and, if you were lucky, an interpretive dance set to a sexual assault police report. I missed the last bit, probably for the best.

⁸ Which was really great, with a fantastic cast: Toby Jones as Vanya, Richard Armitage as Astrov, Ciarán Hinds as the Professor, and Rosalind Eleazar as Yelena.

⁹ Happy, jolly little elves!

¹⁰ Let’s briefly note that the Chinese social credit system does incorporate behavior on social media.

¹¹ Mad props to the player of the Head Manager, who brought a set of candy canes flavored such delightful flavors as coal, kale, pickle, and clam.

¹² If I had any criticism about that sort of thing, it’s that often the workgroups wouldn’t get adequate instructions or supplies, and it was never all together clear to me whether that was a design choice or just standard larp wonkiness. And in practice it didn’t really matter, except that I (as a manager) wanted my workgroups to succeed, and I (as a player) wanted to fulfill the design of the larp, and I couldn’t really reconcile those desires without knowing what was intentional by the organizers.

¹³ There’s also honestly no way to really do it in a game. You’ll always be able to opt-out, for example.